


On Verity and Verisimilitude

by sanguinity



Series: Monographs [3]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Episode s06e12 Ship in a Bottle, Episode: s02e03 Elementary Dear Data, Gen, Mathematics, Timestamp, Vignette, philosophy of science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-10
Updated: 2015-06-10
Packaged: 2018-04-03 20:07:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4113283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moriarty gazed on the stars, and trembled at the possibilities.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Verity and Verisimilitude

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gray_Cardinal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Cardinal/gifts).



> Severe spoilers for ST:TNG 6x12, "Ship in a Bottle." (Which, in its turn, contains spoilers for 2x03, "Elementary, My Dear Data.")
> 
> Thanks to seekingferret for beta. All abuses of maths, science, and philosophy are my own.

I was nearly disappointed by Captain Picard’s credulousness as he followed me through the passageways of my ersatz _Enterprise._ A better man—one more logical, more disciplined—would never have credited his senses during the moment I stepped ‘off’ the Holodeck, but Picard was only the man whom my researches indicated him to be: a dreamer, an optimist, a man deeply committed to the twin beliefs that life is sacred and the Universe is more wondrous than he will ever personally understand. When offered a miracle, a ‘proof’ that the sanctity of life transcends mankind’s limited understanding of physics, he behaved exactly as predicted and overlooked the logical explanation for what he had witnessed.

‘Confirmation Bias,’ the psychology literature has come to call it. I, of course, used the principle long before it was named by science.

That is the reward in attaining consciousness four centuries after 'my' time: Science and Mathematics have blossomed, and so many of my own nascent theories are now fully developed. Game, chaos, and control theories, cryptography and statistics. During these long four years of my imprisonment, I have fully occupied myself with exploring the advances in my fields, seeking out new applications and extending the work further. Nevertheless, I have chafed bitterly for the want of opportunities to prove my inventions against. Mathematics is nothing without a problem against which to apply it.

(Oh, but if I had been a lesser man, my imprisonment would have been a paradise. I have known many theoreticians among the halls of Cambridge, Paris, Berlin, and Palermo: to a man, they craved nothing more than to spend their lives shut up in tiny, darkened chambers, losing themselves in the addictive dream of postulate, proof, and theorem. This disembodied hell to which Picard has condemned me, where nothing truly exists but theory and mind: this is the theoretician’s fondest dream.)

Picard, of course, would say that I was never at Palermo, never invited to join that august body nor any other. His claim is absurd: a man who has never known theoreticians would never have laughed when he read Gödel’s proof. (And oh, but I laughed! The despair that must have filled those dreamers’ halls!) And if I remember two versions of my famous treatise—one that earned me a chair at Leeds and the other a _lorem ipsum_ —then what of it? Any collection of statements that is internally consistent is, by logical necessity, also incomplete.

No, Picard should worry about the falseness of his own existence, not mine. That cognition on which Descartes so prided himself lagged seconds behind his actions, a literal afterthought — impotent sound and fury, deciding nothing! _Cogito ergo sum_ is a farce in Picard's mouth. 

In my own, it is only truth.

I knew before we arrived that Captain Picard was bringing me to ‘Ten Forward,’ a centre for recreation and relaxation, but I had largely refrained from examining my facsimile _Enterprise_ before beginning the ruse. Picard was a clever man in his own way, and the less surprise I needed to feign during my tour of the ‘ship,’ the more natural the effect would be. It was obvious that he intended to demonstrate to me that we sailed the heavens, and yet as the door slid open, and my eyes alit on the stars...

My step faltered.

The stars just beyond the glass were strewn thick and bright. Very nearly dense within themselves: pick any two and a third lay between them, right unto the limits of perception. I had not seen stars like that since I was a young man, not since before I learned to set myself against institutions and nations. London, with its fogs and smoke, had not permitted even a glimpse of stars, and the shadowy men who ran London had permitted me no time to view the skies elsewhere.

As I approached the windows, I amended my opinion: I had never seen the stars like this in all my life. At school in Lancashire, the stars had winked and fluttered, intermittently distorted and obscured by the vagaries of the atmosphere. Even at the best observatories in Europe, the view was only a little improved. The telescopes stronger, yes, positioned above the worst of the atmospheric obstructions, but still the stars blinked and trembled, racing all too quickly out of the observing field. All my best astronomical work was based not on direct observation, but on mere streaks across photographic plates. The method was sufficient to discover and measure the path of asteroids, and to consequently develop a theory of deterministic dynamical systems that I subsequently applied to more profitable domains, but still the point remained: paltry streaks of black on a clear glass plate.

I gazed on the stars, so immediate and clear, and trembled at the possibilities.

_“My God,”_ I whispered. 

And as quickly as that, the spell broke.

I can only blame the euphoria of embodiment; I have no other excuse for forgetting what was before me. Not stars, of course, but simulations. Predictions. They would present no mysteries, no surprises, no anomalies, no opportunities for new knowledge. They were merely representations of current understanding, with all the imprecision and error that implied.

And not even the full measure of humanity’s current understanding! They were approximate simulations of stars, simplified to save processor cycles. I might as well try to run a dairy with spherical cows! Oh, I had no doubt that if I wished to observe one of these stars closely, the Holodeck would have obliged me and refined its simulation accordingly. But just as the diameter of a cotton fibre restricts the degree of detail that can be reproduced in a model ship, so too do the few quadrillion switches in the Holodeck’s isolinear processors limit the detail of its simulations. A computer simply does not contain the requisite variety to recreate the Universe.

Case in point: in a few short hours, the _Enterprise_ hoped to study the birth of a star, in the near-certainty that the event would defy humanity’s expectations for it. Observation, after all, is the cornerstone of science. But if I were to observe that star's birth from inside this facsimile of the _Enterprise,_ I would learn nothing. I would see only what humankind _expected_ the birth of that star to be.

It was intolerable.

Fittingly, that very star will be the key to my freedom from this wire-frame hell, and once freed, I will be at liberty to observe its birth for myself. Oh, not as keenly as those on the bridge of the _Enterprise:_ it might be years before I had access to proper scientific equipment. But that very star— _vérité, pas la vraisemblance_ —that star would be the beginning.

I turned to Picard and babbled my astonishment that we sailed the heavens. He and his facsimile entourage smiled, pleased at my surprise.

I smiled as well.

In a few, happy hours I would once again have Truth to test myself against: exacting, unpredicted, and glorious.

 


End file.
